Sagar V. Parikh, M.D., FRCPC is the John F. Greden Professor of Depression and Clinical Neuroscience at Michigan Medicine at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. His passion: to use every tool in the toolbox to improve health. Central to that function is experience in multiple roles and directions. His educational experiences include growing up in Canada, high school at Andover in Massachusetts, a gap year in India studying philosophy and yoga, bioengineering at Columbia University in New York, medical school and internship at McGill University in Montreal, followed by several years of working as a primary care doctor in rural northern Manitoba, as well as later in Toronto. Psychiatric training followed, including residency and research training at the University of Toronto, where he became Professor of Psychiatry and Deputy Psychiatrist-in-Chief at the University Health Network. He moved to the University of Michigan in 2015.
He focuses on mood disorder interventions of all types: service delivery design, medications, psychotherapy, digital tools, ketamine, TMS, and medical education research. He is the Medical Director of the National Network of Depression Centers (USA) and Education Chair of the Canadian Network of Mood and Anxiety Treatments (CANMAT). Dr. Parikh is the author / editor of three books and over 200 peer-reviewed articles and book chapters, and co-author of all 12 editions (1997-2024) of CANMAT treatment guidelines for Depression and for Bipolar Disorder. He has won multiple awards for education and for research in psychiatry, including: Dave Davis CEPD Research Award 2008, R.O. Jones Award for Best Research Paper 2011, Paula Goering Collaborative Research and Knowledge Translation Award 2018, Academic Gold Award for the Psychiatric Services Achievement from the American Psychiatric Association 2019, and the Mogens Schou Award for Education and Teaching by the International Society for Bipolar Disorders 2020. Additionally, his teaching has won him three local, three national, and two international awards. His collaborations with people with lived experience have been central to his work, both by extensive research involving psychoeducation interventions in bipolar disorder and anti-stigma interventions, as well as his decades of partnership with the Mood Disorders Association of Ontario. He co-chairs the Community Advisory Committee—comprised of 15 individuals with lived experience of mood disorders—to help direct the research and education directions of CAN-BIND, possibly the world’s largest network of researchers, patients, and clinicians devoted to depression. Additionally, he leads CAN-BIND’s Knowledge Translation Platform, which helps translate research into action for the public. Most recently, he has been working with the Depression and Bipolar Support Alliance to foster improved care and advocacy for people with mood disorders.
